European markets fall

Concerns over Greece helped to push Europe’s main stock indices mostly into the red.

Trading just ended for the day with the German, French, Italian and Spanish markets all down.

This cancels out Wednesday afternoon’s rally after Greece claimed a deal was close. Shares on Wall Street are also down, but in London the FTSE 100 crept higher.

Photograph: Thomson Reuters

Jasper Lawler of CMC Markets sums it up:

It was a delayed reaction, but European stocks fell on Thursday once it had been fully determined from new official comments that Greece is still far apart from creditors over conditions for the country’s bailout.

Greece won't join BRICS Development Bank

Helena Smith reports

Prime minister Alexis Tsipras may have been intrigued - and pleasantly surprised - when Russia’s deputy finance minister Sergei Storchak invited Greece to become the sixth member of the BRICS Development Bank - but less a month later, the leftist-led government appears to have nixed any notion that Athens is seriously contemplating the offer.

“anyone who believes that the Development Bank can replace an agreement with the institutions [EU and IMF] does not know the economic reality of Greece. We are an indivisible part of the European Union. It is an issue [to be dealt with] in our family and we have to solve it in Europe.”

Varoufakis said of negotiations with the EU and IMF to keep the debt-stricken country afloat.

“All our other relations with Russia, China, the USA, Singapore or Japan will develop based on interest but we won’t find a solution to negotiations outside European institutions and the European family,”.

Varoufakis’ intervention draws a line under one of the odder episodes of the debt crisis. Storchak, who heads the New Development Bank, made the offer during a telephone conversation with Tsipras. Shortly after, Tsipras’ anti-austerity coalition appointed former IMF representative Panagiotis Roumeliotis to examine whether Greece should indeed take it seriously.

Operated by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the New Development Bank is seen as an alternative to the Wold Bank and International Monetary Fund. Established with the express aim of facilitating financial cooperation among the five emerging markets, some in Athens had wondered whether it could possibly replace Greece’s traditional reliance on Europe as doubts over the country’s ability to stay in single currency also grew.

Greece’s government, of course, strongly agrees that its debts need to be shrunk. But this enthusiasm isn’t shared by eurozone governments and the European Central Bank, who own so much Greek debt between them.

Greece says 'high-level' political intervention will be needed

Greece’s lead negotiator, Euclid Tsakalotos, has warned that it will take a “high-level” political agreement to actually drive a deal though.

Speaking to the Guardian from the Belgian capital, where the Brussels Group of technical teams will be resuming talks on Thursday, Tsakalotos told us:

“The [two sides] will never converge completely but the general impression is that they are converging.”

And Tsakalotos, who is Greece’s Deputy Foreign minister, believes that the final push must come from political leaders:

“There is now a reasonable chance that whatever convergence still needs to be done after the Brussels Group will be done at a higher level where politicians will be called in for the final trade-off and will bridge the gap.”

Here’s the full story, in which Tsakalotos also criticises the IMF for being “very, very tough” and not really engaging with Greece’s needs....

Greece says high-level political trade-off still needed to stave off bankruptcy